Eat Your Vegetables...

I think that everyone was told by his or her parents to "Eat your vegetables!" at one point and that's what I've been telling myself all week.

I haven't had the easiest time getting back on track for the past couple of weeks, but I made a deal with myself that I'd do at least one thing right --and then keep adding to that week after week. This past week my goal was to eat more vegetables. Which I did! I had veggies and fruits at almost every meal, and had a big spinach salad with broccoli, carrots and onions each day. I even found myself craving veggies and that I had to "hide" them less often, such as in pasta or a pizza. Instead, I enjoyed them raw with just a little bit of low-fat dressing or olive oil.

This next week, I have two goals for myself: to stick to my POINTS and to drink more water. I've been drinking way too much diet soda, which just isn't healthy in its own right. So for this week, I'll have diet soda when I go out to dinner, but not at home. You'd be surprised how difficult this is for me. I don't drink many alcoholic beverages, but I really like low-calorie flavored drinks like Vitamin Water or Diet Snapple. But plain, old water really is the best so I need to get into drinking enough of it each day instead of those other things.

I know that I need to do more exercise, but I've decided that I'm not going to be too hard on myself and make a million changes at once. What I REALLY neneed the help with is my eating. Well, that's always what I need the help with and I want to see if changing just one thing at a time will allow me to stay on track. I still don't know why this is so hard for me -- to just eat less, I mean. But I just LOVE food. Last night, I went out for Italian for my friend's birthday and ordered lasagna. I didn't finish it, but my God, it was wonderful. Definitely not part of a weight loss plan, but I enjoyed it and not even in a "filling my emotions" way. I just fucking loved the lasagna. And that's my main problem. I'm 5'3" and have the appetite of a 6'4" football player. Frankly, I wish I can have it both ways: I wish that I can eat whatever I want and be in shape. If I met a genie and he gave me three wishes, I wouldn't even ask for money or world peace or power or anything like that. I think this is what I'd wish for.

Some days like today, when I have PMS and want to eat everything, I get so frustrated because eating should be such a simple thing. You eat for fuel, you eat to live and that should be it. Why couldn't I be born that way? Why couldn't I be one of those people who's naturally thin and just doesn't care that much about food? I mean, my gradmother is like that so it's in my genes -- and she's 94! It seems to be so unfair that I had to be born without an off switch for eating and a body that wants to be fat. I hate feeling like I'm not allowed to eat, that I eat half a serving of lasagna and the pounds are going to pile on.

Which brings me to another decision that I've made about myself: I no longer care if I ever get to be thin. It just ain't gonna happen, unless I starve myself, which I can't do. Hell, I can barely last a week without going off plan. So my goal -- for now; it might change -- is to simply get to under 200 pounds. If I can be 198, 199 and be in decent enough shape -- decent enough so that I can walk around without having to take breaks -- I can deal with it. I just think that my dreams of being at my ideal weight of 125 or so are an impossibility.

I don't know why I'm so disciplined with some things and just can't get my act together when it comes to eating. I mean, I'm obsessed with getting things in on deadline at work and always do; I made a goal to create 100 pieces of jewelry before opening my online store and I'm already at 71 items; I write in this blog fairly frequently. So it's not beyond me to come up with a goal and stick with it. In fact, 95 percent of my life is pretty goal-oriented, I'd say. I'm the person who said, "I'm gonna write a novel!" and "I'm gonna record an album!" and actually did both. And when people ask me how I did these things, I usually answer, "I just DID it rather than talking about it."

There's been a lot of talk about obesity and what "causes" it and sometimes I wonder if I'm really just born this way. I've been obsessed with food since I was a kid. I didn't come from a family where we ate unhealthy things so I wasn't raised on fried food or candy. And yet, the desire for food has always been in me -- I've always been a fat girl dying to escape --and finally did when I was an adult, despite trying to get rid of my urges with anorexia and bulimia. It's weird. I honestly don't understand why people feel the need to get very drunk. For someone like me who's creative and whose mind is always going, I just don't GET that urge to drink until you're so out of it that you can't function. I guess this is somewhat similar. Many people don't GET my craving for food, why I always have to have it, how it makes me happy and numbs pain, boredom, sadness, etc. It's easy to say, "Oh, just don't eat that," but I challenge those who just can't imagine a Saturday night without booze to stay completely sober when everyone around you is drinking beer after beer. See, for me, I can take or leave alcohol and don't care. I just don't crave it at all. Then there are those who can take or leave a plate of fries and just don't care.

By the way, for those folks out there who keep crying about the "obesity epidemic!" and for the Maura Kellys who think that seeing happy fat people means that obesity is being promoted, here are some TV shows that really do deserve the notice:

America's Favorite Pig Outs: This Travel Channel show -- yes, it's on the Travel Channel -- was all about restaurants that offer ginormous portions ofgreasy, fatty food. There was one place that had mozzarella sticks and french fry sandwiches; another offered 20-scoop sundaes! The worst offended was this restaurant called Heart Attack that was designed to look like a hospital. Inside a "doctor" would "prescribe" dishes like hamburgers and fries dipped in lard (blech) and the dishes had names like "The quadruple bypass." (I swear I'm not making this up). There was one dish that had some name like "The coronary," which consisted of about seven pounds of crap -- and if you could finish it, you got wheeled out of the restaurant on a gurney. Oh, and they have a scale there and give special bonuses to people who weight more than 450 pounds. Holy cripers, this is just so wrong on so many levels.

Man Vs. Food: This is also on the Travel Channel. The host, Adam Richman, who's rather portly, competes in various eating contests around the country. He often eats up to 10 pounds of food in a serving and looks like he's about to die while doing so. He's chunky, but not quite obese; I don't get how he's not 450-500 pounds.

I honestly don't think we can blame the media on anything -- it's up to PARENTS to help their kids learn about nutrition -- but if we have to point fingers at anything on TV, these two shows are a great place to start.